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As of next year Romania could have a vaccine reimbursement legislative framework in place and a budget to allow for such arrangements, Health Minister Alexandru Rafila told the online debate "Accessibility vs. Information on Lifelong Vaccination" organized by on Thursday Romania's Coalition of Chronic Disease Patients' Organizations.
According to the Minister, chronic patients could receive free vaccines, while healthy adults could benefit from partial vaccine reimbursement to render immunization "attractive".
"We need to find a vaccine reimbursement mechanism, particularly for people with chronic illnesses and not only, because we are talking about adult vaccination. An important component is adult education and information. (...) For a patient with a chronic illness - reimbursement that should amount to free availability. For healthy adults - maybe a certain percentage to make the vaccine attractive on the one hand, and I think that this is a good procedure for the authorities in general and for the National Health Insurance Office in particular, because beyond reducing morbidity and mortality, it also cuts the expenses made by the health insurance offices," the Health Minister declared, Agerpres.ro informs.
Rafila said the state needs to find vaccine reimbursement "levers".
"As we talk about individual protection and public health at the same time, it is normal for the state to find vaccine reimbursement levers so that we really have a consistent public health policy. (...) We probably need to also address the Health Technology Assessment, the evaluation process of medical technologies, which has a completely different meaning in the case of vaccines, which are disease-preventing biological products, they do not have a therapeutic effect," Rafila said.
President of the National Agency for Medicines and Medical Devices (ANMDM) Razvan Prisada said that one of the "keys to achieving the proposed targets" is increased access to vaccination and vaccines, which would solve the problem of predictability, as they would be with dispensed in pharmacies on the basis of reimbursed or free prescriptions, plus there would be a clear record of medicine movements.
"We would have a clear record of what is happening and a predictability of supply, which in my view is essential for adequate and continuous stocks, as per law requirements," said the ANMDM president.
